Imagine a politician who is so hated by the political establishment that people form or fund entire parties to stop him.
That is where Donald Trump is today. At present, he looks like the safe-bet Republican presidential candidate for next year, despite obviously coordinated efforts from the political establishment to stop him.
Now a third party is getting ready to run its own candidate for president, with one and only one goal: to stop Trump from getting elected.
A New Third Party
American politics is known for its two-party structure, with Democrats and Republicans basically taking turns having the Congressional majority and the White House. To an outsider, this structure may seem overly narrow; is there really no room for a third party?
Part of the answer to this question is that the two big parties really aren’t parties in the traditional European sense, but function more as election coalitions. Unlike European parties, the Democrats and Republicans have no high-profile chairpersons, no central committes that dictate party policy. Generally, they are decentralized entities, without a European-style top-down organization where people are promoted up the ranks based on party loyalty.
Although the two parties have become a bit more centralized in the past 20 years, they are still ages behind Europe’s tight, strictly top-down structures. The national coordination that does exist is entirely centered around campaign fundraising.
With a relatively loose structure, the two dominant parties in America lend considerable room to factions under the same banner. Those factions can differ as much as European parties do under the same ideological banner.
That does not mean there are no third parties. There are plenty of them: a recent estimate tallied 52 of them. Among those, 35 have fielded a presidential candidate at some point. Some of these candidates have made a name for themselves, like Ralph Nader, the perennial Green Party candidate. Other well-known third parties are the Libertarians and the Constitution Party on the right and the Working Families Party on the left.
Candidates from these small parties occasionally win seats in state legislatures and local assemblies, but they rarely make any splash in national politics. The notable exception is the 1992 presidential race, when Texas businessman Henry Ross Perot entered as a candidate for the Reform Party. Ever since that election, in which Democrat candidate Bill Clinton defeated incumbent Republican President George Bush Sr., analysts and pundits have debated whether or not Ross Perot took so many votes from Bush that he effectively won the election for Clinton.
Having worked in American politics for 17 years and having experienced how right-of-center voters reason, I am inclined to conclude that Perot did indeed cause Bush to lose. However, Bush himself was not exactly a vote magnet: if there has ever been an American president who could not explain to voters why he wanted to be president, it would be George Bush Sr.
There is valid concern among conservatives that a third party may do the same to Trump in next year’s presidential election. So far, no credible third-party candidate exists; to find a third party that has the resources to land a candidate in the mainstream of the presidential campaign, one has to search the American political landscape with a microscope.
There is one exception, though. It is not one of the ‘established’ third parties, but a relatively new constellation called No Labels. On their website they claim to have been around since 2009, though their CEO Nancy Jacobson says the party was not started until late 2010. In their current form they are an off-shoot of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. This caucus was formed in 2017 and billed itself as a group of legislators who simply wanted to put ideology aside and focus on practical policy solutions.
This all sounds good, almost as the ideal path forward for a country that has been rocked by vicious political partisanship for too long. However, before we uncork the champagne and celebrate America’s return to political civility, let us take a closer look at who No Labels really are.
Their legislative arm, the Problem Solvers Caucus, has built a legislative record that is far from mainstream. At every turn, they have promoted an expansion in entitlement spending, they have sought to relax immigration laws, and they have supported small but clearly visible encroachments on Americans’ unique constitutional right to keep and bear firearms.
Same Old Neocons
The No Labels party has very much the same profile. Politically, they present themselves as
an “insurance plan” that would allow a Unity [presidential] ticket to run in 2024 if the two parties select unreasonably divisive presidential nominees.
Every time a politician says that he or she strives for unity, it is a good time to ask who will define that unity. In this case, as we scrape the surface of their website, we find a well-known political agenda. In the section called “Our Beliefs”, No Labels explain their policy platform. They offer several nice points about how they care about the country more than political parties, how political “leaders need to listen more to the majority” than to “extremists” on both sides.
What is missing from this section is points about how they want to address pressing policy issues, including America’s runaway fiscal problems or the serious threat to the nation that comes with a virtually non-existing southern border.
The only policy point offered by No Labels is their unending gratitude to “our men and women in uniform who wake up every day to keep the world safe.”
In this point, we find a clue to what kind of political force No Labels actually represents. By offering a strong military as their only policy vision, and by giving that military the assignment “to keep the world safe”, No Labels flags up as a traditional neoconservative political construct. They are the election arm, so to speak, of America’s neocon establishment.
This impression is strengthened by a look at the policy accomplishments by the aforementioned Problem Solver Caucus in Congress:
- They were instrumental in moving massive pandemic-related spending through Congress, spending that contributed to a $4.5 trillion increase in the U.S. government debt—in one year;
- They got a major infrastructure bill passed into law, which the Competitive Enterprise Institute labeled “the most wasteful” of its kind ever; and
- They actively pursued more tax-paid subsidies for health care expenditures, in particular prescription drugs.
These initiatives by the Caucus are all aimed at increasing government spending, often on programs or temporary items that traditionally fall under the welfare-state banner. At no point do they show any interest in limiting government spending, let alone addressing the budget deficit.
Again, this is traditional neoconservative economic policy. So is their strong commitment to the military—and its global mission “to keep the world safe.” We know this commitment as the principle of Pax Americana.
Stop Trump: The Only Reason to Run
Since 2020, the neocon movement has added one more item to its policy platform: they are Donald Trump’s most passionate political adversaries. Reports the Washington Examiner:
If former President Donald Trump is not the GOP nominee for the 2024 election, a third-party organization may consider dropping its ballot initiative to put a centrist candidate on the main stage.
After paying lip service to their previous point about shunning extremes in both of the established parties, No Labels flags up as a fervent anti-Trump outfit. According to Politico, No Labels conditions “its third-party effort in part on Trump’s fate,” in other words whether or not he is the Republican candidate. If he is not, they will apparently not field their own candidate.
This means, in short, that the Democrat party can run whatever candidate they want, including Joe Biden, who is currently under serious scrutiny for corruption. None of this matters, evidently, when No Labels considers “extreme” candidates.
In the event Trump is the Republican nominee, who would No Labels elect as their presidential candidate? Back in July, Aaron Blake with the Washington Post opined on that. Apparently worried that No Labels will steal too many votes away from the Democrat presidential candidate, Blake explains:
it would seem to make the most sense for No Labels to pick a Republican to lead the ticket—or at least someone who would pull significant votes from that side—thus insulating itself (rhetorically, at least) from the idea that it’s playing the spoiler role.
Since Blake writes for the Washington Post, he has to be concerned for the future political influence of the Democrat party. Nevertheless, his point about No Labels striving for genuine bipartisanship leads him to point to Republican Larry Hogan as a viable candidate. From 2015 to 2023, Hogan served as governor of Maryland, a state whose electorate is dominated by upscale suburbs of Washington, DC, and the notoriously poor and crime-ridden city of Baltimore.
Both urban areas lean heavily to the left, which means that from a narrow statistical view of electability, Hogan did well winning two terms as governor. The folks over at No Labels appear to think that this should put Hogan on the shortlist.
Blake also mentions Chris Sununu, currently governor of New Hampshire. Sununu is also a Republican, and his state is even more problematic than Maryland as far as the electorate is concerned. It used to be a conservatively Republican state, then swung in the libertarian direction in the 1990s, and has more recently seen an influx of the same type of well-to-do leftists as Maryland has seen. Thanks to New Hampshire having no income tax, high-earning liberals (who gladly vote for more government spending) prefer to live there to other Boston suburbs located in Massachusetts.
Sununu has earned a reputation for being agnostic on Trump, but in reality he belongs with the anti-Trump crowd. His problem as far as a presidential race goes is that he is governor of a small state.
There is a third name on Aaron Blake’s list of top choices to run as president for No Labels: U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia. Among the names floated as a third-party presidential candidate, Manchin has unquestionably the strongest policy record—at least from a Republican viewpoint. He has repeatedly stopped Democrat legislative initiatives in the Senate because he felt they were too radical, spent too much money, or otherwise expanded government incursions into the lives of American families and businesses.
Manchin has integrity and he is interested, but he is also 76 years old. That may not be very dramatic where Manchin is today: at least ten of the 100 incumbent Senators are older than Manchin, with six having turned 80 or becoming octogenarians this year. Diane Feinstein, a Democrat, has turned 90 and Republican Chuck Grassley is about to do the same. However, in a presidential campaign where the sitting president is 81 this year and Trump, his likely Republican challenger, is 77, the nomination of someone who is one year younger than Trump might not give No Labels the credibility they seek as builders of long-term, stable bipartisanship.
Other names have been mentioned in the context of a No Labels presidential candidate, including former Congresswoman Liz Cheney. Like the other names mentioned here, from a strictly administrative viewpoint, she would make a good president. However, she would be a divisive choice, given her participation in the glaringly immoral handling of evidence on the committee that ‘investigated’ the events of January 6th, 2021.
The No Labels party plans to hold a convention in April next year. Whoever they elect as their candidate for president, that person will be completely focused on not repeating the history of the 2016 election.
America cannot afford another president who walks into the future backwards. America needs real, grown-up leadership.
Is that so hard to find?
The Anti-Trump Third Party
Imagine a politician who is so hated by the political establishment that people form or fund entire parties to stop him.
That is where Donald Trump is today. At present, he looks like the safe-bet Republican presidential candidate for next year, despite obviously coordinated efforts from the political establishment to stop him.
Now a third party is getting ready to run its own candidate for president, with one and only one goal: to stop Trump from getting elected.
A New Third Party
American politics is known for its two-party structure, with Democrats and Republicans basically taking turns having the Congressional majority and the White House. To an outsider, this structure may seem overly narrow; is there really no room for a third party?
Part of the answer to this question is that the two big parties really aren’t parties in the traditional European sense, but function more as election coalitions. Unlike European parties, the Democrats and Republicans have no high-profile chairpersons, no central committes that dictate party policy. Generally, they are decentralized entities, without a European-style top-down organization where people are promoted up the ranks based on party loyalty.
Although the two parties have become a bit more centralized in the past 20 years, they are still ages behind Europe’s tight, strictly top-down structures. The national coordination that does exist is entirely centered around campaign fundraising.
With a relatively loose structure, the two dominant parties in America lend considerable room to factions under the same banner. Those factions can differ as much as European parties do under the same ideological banner.
That does not mean there are no third parties. There are plenty of them: a recent estimate tallied 52 of them. Among those, 35 have fielded a presidential candidate at some point. Some of these candidates have made a name for themselves, like Ralph Nader, the perennial Green Party candidate. Other well-known third parties are the Libertarians and the Constitution Party on the right and the Working Families Party on the left.
Candidates from these small parties occasionally win seats in state legislatures and local assemblies, but they rarely make any splash in national politics. The notable exception is the 1992 presidential race, when Texas businessman Henry Ross Perot entered as a candidate for the Reform Party. Ever since that election, in which Democrat candidate Bill Clinton defeated incumbent Republican President George Bush Sr., analysts and pundits have debated whether or not Ross Perot took so many votes from Bush that he effectively won the election for Clinton.
Having worked in American politics for 17 years and having experienced how right-of-center voters reason, I am inclined to conclude that Perot did indeed cause Bush to lose. However, Bush himself was not exactly a vote magnet: if there has ever been an American president who could not explain to voters why he wanted to be president, it would be George Bush Sr.
There is valid concern among conservatives that a third party may do the same to Trump in next year’s presidential election. So far, no credible third-party candidate exists; to find a third party that has the resources to land a candidate in the mainstream of the presidential campaign, one has to search the American political landscape with a microscope.
There is one exception, though. It is not one of the ‘established’ third parties, but a relatively new constellation called No Labels. On their website they claim to have been around since 2009, though their CEO Nancy Jacobson says the party was not started until late 2010. In their current form they are an off-shoot of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. This caucus was formed in 2017 and billed itself as a group of legislators who simply wanted to put ideology aside and focus on practical policy solutions.
This all sounds good, almost as the ideal path forward for a country that has been rocked by vicious political partisanship for too long. However, before we uncork the champagne and celebrate America’s return to political civility, let us take a closer look at who No Labels really are.
Their legislative arm, the Problem Solvers Caucus, has built a legislative record that is far from mainstream. At every turn, they have promoted an expansion in entitlement spending, they have sought to relax immigration laws, and they have supported small but clearly visible encroachments on Americans’ unique constitutional right to keep and bear firearms.
Same Old Neocons
The No Labels party has very much the same profile. Politically, they present themselves as
Every time a politician says that he or she strives for unity, it is a good time to ask who will define that unity. In this case, as we scrape the surface of their website, we find a well-known political agenda. In the section called “Our Beliefs”, No Labels explain their policy platform. They offer several nice points about how they care about the country more than political parties, how political “leaders need to listen more to the majority” than to “extremists” on both sides.
What is missing from this section is points about how they want to address pressing policy issues, including America’s runaway fiscal problems or the serious threat to the nation that comes with a virtually non-existing southern border.
The only policy point offered by No Labels is their unending gratitude to “our men and women in uniform who wake up every day to keep the world safe.”
In this point, we find a clue to what kind of political force No Labels actually represents. By offering a strong military as their only policy vision, and by giving that military the assignment “to keep the world safe”, No Labels flags up as a traditional neoconservative political construct. They are the election arm, so to speak, of America’s neocon establishment.
This impression is strengthened by a look at the policy accomplishments by the aforementioned Problem Solver Caucus in Congress:
These initiatives by the Caucus are all aimed at increasing government spending, often on programs or temporary items that traditionally fall under the welfare-state banner. At no point do they show any interest in limiting government spending, let alone addressing the budget deficit.
Again, this is traditional neoconservative economic policy. So is their strong commitment to the military—and its global mission “to keep the world safe.” We know this commitment as the principle of Pax Americana.
Stop Trump: The Only Reason to Run
Since 2020, the neocon movement has added one more item to its policy platform: they are Donald Trump’s most passionate political adversaries. Reports the Washington Examiner:
After paying lip service to their previous point about shunning extremes in both of the established parties, No Labels flags up as a fervent anti-Trump outfit. According to Politico, No Labels conditions “its third-party effort in part on Trump’s fate,” in other words whether or not he is the Republican candidate. If he is not, they will apparently not field their own candidate.
This means, in short, that the Democrat party can run whatever candidate they want, including Joe Biden, who is currently under serious scrutiny for corruption. None of this matters, evidently, when No Labels considers “extreme” candidates.
In the event Trump is the Republican nominee, who would No Labels elect as their presidential candidate? Back in July, Aaron Blake with the Washington Post opined on that. Apparently worried that No Labels will steal too many votes away from the Democrat presidential candidate, Blake explains:
Since Blake writes for the Washington Post, he has to be concerned for the future political influence of the Democrat party. Nevertheless, his point about No Labels striving for genuine bipartisanship leads him to point to Republican Larry Hogan as a viable candidate. From 2015 to 2023, Hogan served as governor of Maryland, a state whose electorate is dominated by upscale suburbs of Washington, DC, and the notoriously poor and crime-ridden city of Baltimore.
Both urban areas lean heavily to the left, which means that from a narrow statistical view of electability, Hogan did well winning two terms as governor. The folks over at No Labels appear to think that this should put Hogan on the shortlist.
Blake also mentions Chris Sununu, currently governor of New Hampshire. Sununu is also a Republican, and his state is even more problematic than Maryland as far as the electorate is concerned. It used to be a conservatively Republican state, then swung in the libertarian direction in the 1990s, and has more recently seen an influx of the same type of well-to-do leftists as Maryland has seen. Thanks to New Hampshire having no income tax, high-earning liberals (who gladly vote for more government spending) prefer to live there to other Boston suburbs located in Massachusetts.
Sununu has earned a reputation for being agnostic on Trump, but in reality he belongs with the anti-Trump crowd. His problem as far as a presidential race goes is that he is governor of a small state.
There is a third name on Aaron Blake’s list of top choices to run as president for No Labels: U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia. Among the names floated as a third-party presidential candidate, Manchin has unquestionably the strongest policy record—at least from a Republican viewpoint. He has repeatedly stopped Democrat legislative initiatives in the Senate because he felt they were too radical, spent too much money, or otherwise expanded government incursions into the lives of American families and businesses.
Manchin has integrity and he is interested, but he is also 76 years old. That may not be very dramatic where Manchin is today: at least ten of the 100 incumbent Senators are older than Manchin, with six having turned 80 or becoming octogenarians this year. Diane Feinstein, a Democrat, has turned 90 and Republican Chuck Grassley is about to do the same. However, in a presidential campaign where the sitting president is 81 this year and Trump, his likely Republican challenger, is 77, the nomination of someone who is one year younger than Trump might not give No Labels the credibility they seek as builders of long-term, stable bipartisanship.
Other names have been mentioned in the context of a No Labels presidential candidate, including former Congresswoman Liz Cheney. Like the other names mentioned here, from a strictly administrative viewpoint, she would make a good president. However, she would be a divisive choice, given her participation in the glaringly immoral handling of evidence on the committee that ‘investigated’ the events of January 6th, 2021.
The No Labels party plans to hold a convention in April next year. Whoever they elect as their candidate for president, that person will be completely focused on not repeating the history of the 2016 election.
America cannot afford another president who walks into the future backwards. America needs real, grown-up leadership.
Is that so hard to find?
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